The Second Murray Leinster Megapack

by Murray Leinster

  After there was no more chance there, it had taken him three months to get here—four hundred miles. There’d been interludes, of course. Once he stopped and joined a group who called themselves guerillas. Before he left them he’d killed a man in cold blood, an act he still remembered with satisfaction.

  Then he’d had to hide from his late companions, and then he’d stayed on at a tiny community where the people were uninformed but resolute—too resolute entirely—and now he’d reached his home town and it was waste.

  “Let’s go out and cut our throats,” said young ex-professor Sims to no one in particular.

  It was a quotation, and he grimaced wryly to himself. He squatted down to watch the area of blackened debris which had been the scene of his childhood.

  Since the bombs began to fall, like everybody else, he’d learned that it didn’t pay to take things for granted, or to be unduly brave, or to be frank about yourself, or anything which had been normal and excusable as little as a year ago. So Steve—no longer professor because there weren’t any colleges or students left—Steve Sims squatted close to the trunk of a tree and attentively regarded the ruins of his home town.

  It was utterly dead and completely uninhabitable. It must have been destroyed a long time ago, because green things were already growing between the fire-blackened timbers where the town was merely flattened and burned out.

  There was a greenish scum on the ponds at the bottoms of the bomb-craters, too, which proved that this was a high-explosive job, not atomic. And that proved that They—the people with bombs and planes—hadn’t an unlimited supply of the atomic bombs which melted the surface of the ground to a sort of crackled, glassy substance, which was highly radioactive.

  Nothing like that was visible here. So if they used ordinary high explosives to flatten a small town, their stock of atomics was limited.

  That was good. Steve recognized it as good, and then he wondered why he thought it was good. Whoever They were—and all of civilization had been smashed, and nobody knew who had started it—They couldn’t be touched by people like Steve. The atomic war had degenerated into an indiscriminate, hysterical mass slaughter of everybody by everybody else.

  Steve was a wanderer, like most of the people left alive. He was homeless, and his only possessions were a very small lady’s automatic pistol, with only two clips of cartridges, a pair of fencing foils with the buttons broken off and the blades filed to needle-sharp points, one blanket—plasticoated on one side so it was water-proof—six child’s copy-books nearly filled with writing, and one-half of a roasted chicken. He’d stolen the chicken two days before.

  “The obvious thing,” he repeated presently, “is to go out and cut my throat. But—”

  “Oh-oh!” he said then.

  There was a movement in the debris. An infinitely cautious movement. For an instant he couldn’t make it out, and then he saw a small figure crawl out from under an indescribable mess that looked like a heap of oversized black jackstraws. The figure looked about in a hunted manner, seemed to listen fearfully, and then came scrambling over the wreckage in Steve’s general direction. It moved with frenzied haste.

  Steve watched, immobile. When somebody ran away, there was usually somebody else after them. It was not the business of a mere Wanderer to interfere. Especially, perhaps, not the business of a former professor of physics with six child’s copy-books full of a partly written treatise on “The Paradox of Indeterminacy.” But the discovery of his home town in ruins had pretty well removed that last reason for noninterference.

  Still, he watched without any movement. The small figure scrambled over a tumbled heap of bricks. Something loose rolled down and other shattered stuff followed. There was a miniature landslide and a cloud of white dust arose.

  “That’s bad!” said Steve.

  The figure raced on. It was very small and pantingly in haste. It seemed filled with desperation. But it was the only moving thing in sight except a lazily soaring buzzard, flying in tranquil circles in the sky.

  Except for the buzzard it was the only moving thing in sight. Then another figure stirred. This one appeared in the shoulder-high weeds which grew everywhere over what had been cleared land around the edge of town. The second was a larger figure. It moved swiftly to cut off the smaller one.

  Steve watched. It was none of his business. The world was in ruins. There was no law. There was no government. There was no hope. So he could see no reason for him to risk his life interfering between two unknown persons, one fleeing and one pursuing. But on the other hand there was no longer any special reason to be careful of his life.

  The smaller figure gained. It came to what had been a street, where the blast of the nearest bomb had blown straight along its length. Trees had fallen, but there was little wreckage. For two hundred yards the running small figure fled without hindrance, unseen by its pursuer and not seeing him. Then it stumbled and fell headlong, and scrambled to its feet and fled again. But now long hair tumbled about its shoulders and streamed behind.

  “The devil!” said Steve Sims, in disgust.

  He rose smoothly to his feet, slid the pack from his back, and pulled out one of the fencing-foils. He ran lightly through the trees, vexed, arguing with himself that this sort of thing happened too often for him to be responsible, that he might have to use a highly precious cartridge, that he might get killed, and generally assuring himself that he was a fool.

  It was almost a quarter-mile before he really saw either of the two figures again. Then he reached a spot where he could look through the trees again upon the town. Much had happened. The girl had discovered her pursuer. He was almost upon her. Somewhere and somehow she had snatched up a splintered bit of wood.

  As Steve reached the woods’ edge, the man snarled and plunged to seize her. She flailed the stick around in a desperate sweep, without accuracy and without real force. He flung up his arm, and the stick broke against it. But then he roared and plucked blindly at his eyes while she gasped and darted for the wood, her wild tresses fluttering behind like yacht pennants billowing in the winds of a happier day.

  Bellowing, the man raced after her. He’d been dust-blinded only for a moment. She was barely ten yards before him when she dived between the first trees. There was utter horror upon her face when Steve appeared before her. But he jerked his thumb to one side.

  “That way,” he said sharply.

  She swerved and fled like a desperate deer. Steve stepped into the line she’d swerved from. The pursuer, raging, plunged into the woods.

  He saw Steve and roared again. He charged.

  And Steve brought up the needle-sharp foil and he ran right upon it, up to the very hilt, so that there was a sickening impact against the hard guard. Steve simply stepped aside and let him crash to the ground. He did not move after he had fallen.

  Some five minutes later, Steve cleaned the foil painstakingly. There had been tobacco in the dead man’s pockets, and he’d had a rusty knife, and a flask of poisonously vile liquor. Also there were four diamond rings and a child’s necklace. Somehow the child’s necklace removed any distaste Steve might otherwise have felt for what he had done.

  He straightened up and tossed aside the leaves on which he’d cleaned the foil. Then there was a faint stirring. The girl’s voice came shakily, although she remained invisible.

  “Th-thanks,” she said.

  “Don’t mention it,” said Steve. He paused, and added, “I split my loot. You may need this.”

  He tossed the knife from the dead man’s pockets in her general direction. Leaves stirred. She came into view. She picked up the knife. She was smudged all over with the charcoal of the timbers in which she had hidden, but she was pretty. He regarded her detachedly. She wiped off her face with the sleeve of the man’s coat she wore.

  “Also, you might like these,” said Steve. “He had them. I’m not a professional assassin and I don’t like to take jewelry. Can you use them?”

  He held out the rings and neck
lace. She searched his face with a hunted expression on her own.

  “I’ll put them down and walk away,” he said drily. “Seriously, you might be able to use them for barter. People want odd things these days.”

  She took a deep breath and moved forward.

  “N-no,” she said, breathing fast. “I’m—not afraid of you. You—you did that.” She looked down at the dead man and swallowed. “He was horrible! Have you anybody else with you?”

  “I’m a lone wolf,” Sims said. “No, I take part of that back. I’m not a wolf. Just alone. How about you? Friends? Is there some place you can go and be safe? I’ll try to take you there if you like.”

  She swallowed again, and then shook her head. She looked at him appealingly. He weighed the situation. In the last seven months the ordinary, everyday world had crashed into small and mangled fragments.

  For a man to stay alive alone was difficult enough. Also, there were the implications of that work on the “Paradox of Indeterminacy,” which was either sheer nonsense or very much more important than the life or safety of any one girl, even though she looked as frightened or as desperately appealing as this one.

  “I’ve got half a chicken, very badly roasted, about a quarter of a mile away,” Steve said without warmth. “I can offer you part of it. In my wandering around I’ve found one or two communities that are hanging together after a fashion. I’ll help you try to find one that will let you join them if you want me to. I’m afraid that’s about all I can do, though.”

  She gasped: “P-please!”

  He did not like to see such gratitude for so problematic a benefit. He turned and walked away. After half a dozen paces he looked back, and she was following. She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of that man’s absurd coat. He went on, scowling. Nobody knew who’d started the atomic war of which this girl, and he, and the dead man left casually back in the woods were all casualties, in common with most of the human race.

  Nobody knew whether it was ended or not. There was civilization of a sort maintaining itself somewhere; that was certain. But what was really positive was that there was no hope for anything but a wandering, wild animal life for the few who survived and were not members of the small and embattled communities of farmers who fought ferociously to keep their own membership alive. Steve himself had not an ounce of fat left on him. The girl looked hungry.

  He reached his pack and slipped it over his shoulders, and then let it slip down again. He took out the half-chicken and handed it to her. Her lips moved hungrily.

  “You said this was all,” she said.

  “Half a chicken for you, and half for me,” he said untruthfully. “Go on and eat it!”

  With a sharp little intake of breath, she did. She was starving, but even so she did not gobble. In the months since the bombs began to fall, he’d seen a great many human beings deteriorate to the level of animals. She hadn’t. He watched until she had devoured the last morsel of the half-chicken. She was still human. She smiled at him apologetically.

  “I was greedy,” she said ruefully, “but it was so good! What now?”

  He debated. No supper for him. No shelter. A girl to look after, and the paradox of indeterminacy a completely hopeless effort since his home town was smashed and the only man who could have offered a fresh viewpoint, which he needed badly, was doubtlessly dead in its ruins.

  “What’s your name?” he asked mildly.

  “Frances.” She looked at him expectantly.

  “Listen, Frances,” he said detachedly. “What say we go out and cut our throats?”

  CHAPTER II

  Fugitive

  After it grew dark they talked quietly. Steve made a camp of sorts, a mile and a half from the place where he’d first seen Frances. Its basis was the trunk of a monster seed-tree that had crashed to earth in a thicket of its second-growth descendants. It meant a supply of rotted, punky wood which would make a flameless, smokeless fire, and the trunk was raised above the ground for part of its length so the fire could be built under it and be invisible from the sky.

  On the way to that place the girl had spotted blackberry bushes and gathered a comforting supply. And after Steve had walled in one side of the tree-trunk with leafy branches, and drawn down his blanket over the other, they ate the blackberries, stumbled through the new-fallen darkness to a nearby brook and drank, and returned to the encampment.

  “You can choose your half of the shelter, and fix your bunk of leaves,” said Steve. “I’ll take the other half and we’ll have the fire between us instead of a sword. And a few leaves on the coals from time to time will keep insects away.”

  “You didn’t tell the truth about the chicken,” the girl said suddenly. “You let me eat it all!”

  “I’m full of berries anyhow,” Steve assured her. “If you want to go to sleep, go ahead. I’m going to write a little.”

  They were in the cramped and improbable shelter. Frances blinked at him in the absurd dim glow that came from the coals.

  “Write?”

  “A master-work,” said Steve in conscious irony. “A treatise on the Paradox of Indeterminacy. It is possibly a triumph of logic and theoretic physics, but it is certainly the most futile thing that anybody ever worked his head off at.”

  He grinned mirthlessly at her across glow from the smoldering rotted wood.

  “In the old days alchemists were frequently thwarted by the fact that their chemicals wouldn’t do what they wanted them to. So they talked of affinities and caloric and phlogiston and various other things that didn’t exist. They were excuses. We modern physicists have been thwarted by the fact that our experiments didn’t work as we wanted them to, either.

  “When you get down to a few thousand atoms or electrons or, whatnot, your experiments begin to go haywire. You can predict how a billion atoms or electrons will behave, but you can’t know what a hundred will do.

  “So we began to talk about indeterminacy. When you’re working with such small numbers of objects that the laws of chance come into play, your results are governed by the laws of chance rather than the ordinary laws of physics. The result is indeterminacy. That’s an excuse, too.”

  She listened to all this gravely. There was still a smudge on her cheek from the charcoal of the ruined town. She’d washed at the brook, but that hadn’t come off. Steve went on with ironic detail:

  “So I began to question the laws of chance. All the other physical laws we know explain how forces act. We can identify the forces—electric charges and the like. Maybe the laws of chance explain how forces act, too, but we’ve never identified any forces to fill the bill. I’ve worked up some clues. I’ve imagined and described some forces that would operate to make heads come up a thousand times in succession, if applied that way.

  “But I haven’t the least idea how they could be generated or detected, unless you consider that Rhine detected them in his psychokinetic experiments. I’m in the position of a man who had imagined electricity on theoretic grounds, but had never heard of it and didn’t know how to generate or detect it. He just knew there must be such a thing and that if he could get hold of it he could go to town.”

  Then Steve shrugged.

  “Mmmmmm, you could win at any card-game,” the girl said. “You could make anything happen that was even faintly possible. Is that it?”

  Steve jumped. He had talked with deliberate ironic intent, because the last man on earth he’d hoped, and that only faintly, could understand his reasoning and help him carry it farther was undoubtedly dead in the wreckage of the town two miles way.

  The man in question had been a putterer and a visionary who was more or less responsible for the fact that Steve had been a professor of physics. The loss of the last hope of another mind to work with him had been a blow. But this girl hadn’t listened blankly! She’d understood!

  “My father’d have liked that idea,” she added, after a moment. “He’d have loved it! He was killed when the town was bombed.” She nodded calmly. “I was away th
en. I came back on foot because the gasoline had already given out. The town was gone when I got here.”

  Steve blinked. Then, tentatively, he said a name. The girl stared at him. “That was my father! You—”

  “I’m Steve Sims,” said Steve wryly. “Maybe you’ve heard of me. I know you now! You were twelve years old when I went off to college. How do you do?”

  They looked at each other across the double-cupful of embers on which Steve put leaves, for smoke, every now and then. Then the girl’s drawn look relaxed.

  “This is—nice!” she said unsteadily. “Of course! You used to write to my father sometimes! It’s like—it’s like finding one’s family again!”

  She blinked to keep back tears, and impulsively reached over to grasp his two hands in hers.

  “It doesn’t take much to make some people happy,” he said gruffly. “How’d you manage to live this long?”

  She told him, in the shelter which smelled of leaf-mold and smoke and dampness. The town was wreckage when she returned to it. She’d had an ancient aunt living in a now-shattered cottage on the edge of town. The old lady had quite incredibly survived the bombing, and indomitably had taken possession of a sawmill-shed beyond the town’s limits. Frances had found her.

  The two women—the one so old and feeble and therefore helpless in adversity, and the other so young and therefore in deadly danger as civilization ceased to be—the two women kept themselves alive. They gathered crops from fields whose owners had been killed by the strafing planes which followed the bombers. They stored food and lost it to plundering Wanderers from whom they hid.

  The aunt had died two weeks back. Frances found her shot dead. There was no explanation and no cause for it. She was simply shot. Frances knew of no person or any community she dared attempt to join. Three days since, a group of Wanderers—the restless displaced persons who roved everywhere like locusts, these days—had come upon her.

  There were women in the band. At first Frances had hoped for safety with them, but one single day taught her better. Before nightfall she slipped away and hid. The women were glad of her going, but some of the men hunted her. One had been close at her heels when she hid in the wreckage of the town. Steve had seen the rest. He’d killed that man.